It has been awhile since I have had the privilege to watch a more modern Bushido tale that truly has the spirit of the genre that Kurosawa and Kobayashi had defined in their ‘classics’. Last time I remember that I’ve had that true privilege was when I saw Yoji Yamada’s “Twilight Samurai” and Yojiro Takita‘s “When the Last Sword is Drawn“; even Takashi Miike’s remakes of “13 Assassins” and “Hara-Kiri: Death of … more

Let’s square this up right away: Bushido films are not for everyone. Why not? For starters, these flicks – usually detailing the morality tales of samurai warriors – rarely tend to be told at breakneck pace. They don’t usually employ too many storytelling techniques all that similar to Western film sensibilities, a surprise given how many Western films are based on samurai pictures; what I mean here … more